Back in February when I switched servers I tried something new and it didn’t really work out, there were several avoidable downtime events in the last months. Maybe no one noticed because it was intermittent and people use feed readers I guess. Anyway, I hope I fixed it now by going to the tried and tested method.
Technical difficulties Read More »
Oh wow, on October 18th, 2009 I made the first post at this blog (originally on wordpress dot com, before the move).
This is also a rare case of me pre-writing a post, so maybe I forget and it will auto publish after 2 months. You will notice because it only has 2 paragraphs. Anyway, 15 years, yay.
Just like at twelve years, here’s a post count per year:
Total: 678 posts, 45.2 per year (compare to 477 / 39.75 per year at 12 years)
Also we have a new best year, 2021 with 98 posts. Trends? No idea, but the pandemic certainly helped by not being outside so much, this has improved since 2023, but I don’t think it’s the only reason.
No changes planned, no future goals, we’ll see if I hit 20 years on this blog (25 overall won’t be hard), and thanks for reading.
Just like in April 2021 instead of upgrading I switched servers and if you can read this the hamsters are running.
I hope the performance will be a bit better and I was also running out of space.
Nothing fancy happened, but please holler if you notice any oddities.
Server move, again Read More »
Happy New Year! While writing yesterday’s post I noticed that it was the tenth of its kind, mostly focusing on expenses, so if you find that boring, I can’t help you.
Let’s start with the easy numbers:
So 2018 was an outlier due to unknown reasons and 2020+2021 were outliers due to Covid 19 and me not going outside a lot, but other than that it seems to be safe inside 300-550 EUR bracket, which means 25 to 45 EUR per month, so less than 1 AAA title per month. I can live with that.
I suppose any statistics about other games are moot, there were some I played a lot, some I played from time to time, some were free and some were bought. Nothing spectacular in a 10 year review I guess.
Hardware costs could be another interesting breakdown but I’m not sure I’ll manage to meaningfully break that down, but I’ll try. My gaming PC from 2019 was about 1500 EUR, then a monitor for 400, some more SSDs (let’s say 300), my old graphics card (maybe 300), another monitor (let’s say 300) and some peripherals. That would be about 3000 EUR in 10 years. Sounds low, but even with a bit of research I think I got most of the parts and might not be missing a lot. Taking notes helps.
Ten years of reviewed years Read More »
And another year over, which means another review post.
OK, I’m at the point where I need to redo the math for last years because I am not sure how to handle these “prepaid XX months of subscription” and this year is especially egregious I think.
In 2019 I counted 26 EUR for 2020 subs in 2019, in 2020 I had both numbers (with and without prepaying), in 2021 I counted the prepaid stuff in this year, then 2022 had nothing from 2021 but 70 prepaid, so I guess I’ll count that in 2023 and have something for 2024, because calculating EVE will be something more complicated this time…
So that brings the total to 636 EUR, that’s 53 EUR per month, slightly more than 2022. This would still be a perfectly valid number, but it’s not painting a realistic picture.
Now if I subtract the EVE sub months for 2024 (oh boy, that’s 23 of them, split over 3 accounts, so basically two of them for the whole year… if I use a 24 month package from the website that would be 270 EUR but if I use the biggest discount paying with PLEX it’s more like 190, so let’s say about 236) then it would only be 400 EUR, or 33 EUR per month. So something in between. So we’ll see how much I will spend on EVE in 2024, but I hope it won’t be that much, even if I’m running my 3 accounts.
Yes, you may laugh, but with the discounts on PLEX, and being able to buy subscriptions with ingame money, just calculating how much you paid for your EVE subscription can be a whole afternoon in itself. Of course it involves spreadsheets, so make of that what you will…
Maybe I’m getting old and caving in to people’s trends, or maybe I’m just trying to learn from the insights and “month in review” posts make sense if you still have something to say that you already didn’t and don’t want a ton of mini posts.
Didn’t get a ton of gaming time in this month, summer has been great, I’ve been outdoors a lot despite no official vacation (except one day, iirc).
We played some WoW, killed the Raid Tier’s end boss on Heroic, have since been struggling to get enough people together for a reclear for the people who missed it (but those also didn’t show up consistently, so maybe only half-way bad form?) but otherwise I’ve ignored it. Logged in a couple of times to grab some achievements or just to relax and do some weeklies, mostly ignoring alts. Refreshing to be a casual for a few weeks!
The 14d free login event in FFXIV came and went and I did put in some hours, but I think I didn’t stress it overly much. I kinda planned to resub directly afterwards, but life got in the way, so I’m holding off until I am needed to tank or heal some Stormblood story dungeons, probably soon-ish.
Then I was craving something different and played a couple games of Stellaris, which was usually a full evening. I suck at it but I like the game. Dug out Age of Wonders III again to see if I might be interested in Planetfall, which was (maybe still is) on sale at the time. But I’m still not feeling it. AoW always teases me with looking and superfluously being like Heroes of Might and Magic, but something is off. PF could be different enough because it’s in space, but i doubt it. I still don’t see them as 4X games for the most part. Might try Civ VI that I found in my library, probably from Epic.
Oh and Blaugust – I managed to keep up with some reading in the first half of the month, not so much in the latter. Discord looked busy though, good times.
Step 1: Announce you’re not taking part in Blaugust
Step 2: Write six blog posts in the first half of the month
Step 3: Profit! (no wait…)
The only winning move is not to play Read More »
I’ve written many times that this is not a WoW blog, just a blog by someone who has played WoW for quite a few years (started in 2005, some short breaks until 2014, then mostly subbed since 2019 again) – but in the last year or so I think 90% of the posts have been about WoW. I do play EVE Online, and at times more than WoW, but I find it very hard to write about, so not many posts. I’ve been slowly progressing through Diablo IV but this is the second post mentioning it, without it being the main topic of the post. (Yes, it’s still fun but not awesome, but I’m still in the story part). And then there are other games. I’ve basically zero interest in Baldur’s Gate III, but all the talk made me wonder if I should replay the original Baldur’s Gate or Planescape: Torment. I probably shouldn’t.
Anyway, after a few weird months (see posting frequency since April) I should probably be happy to have some topic to write about once per week, even if it’s just a small blurb on how the raid went, even if I don’t want to exclusively write about WoW. But then again, there’s nothing drawing me to FFXIV or SWTOR or GW2 at the moment and that list of upcoming games for 2022? Yeah well, I played Gamedec and it was good and then the reviews for Redfall were abysmal and the ones for Forspoken were mixed or worse, Nightingale hasn’t released and so on…
Topics, games, WoW Read More »
Oh wow, a second one of these posts. For several reasons June was probably my month with the least amount of gaming time in a long while and July doesn’t look much better with some plans.
I did end up buying Diablo 4 and starting the campaign, and it’s fun, but I’m not particularly far – taking it slow but I kinda wanna see more.
June 4th was my (and our) first raid day, cleared 8/9 Normal that week (Sun+Tue as usual) and then my next raid was the the 25th + 27th when we ended up at 5/9 Heroic. Tbh not completely sure what the guild did in the 2 weeks that I missed, I think they were on 9/9 Normal 1/9 Heroic.
Still at zero M+ and didn’t log in a lot, but at least I managed to get my gear in shape, in relation to my online time – 423 iLvl, where 424 is the max iLvl in Normal. But I guess if I can not totally fall behind with just raid logging I’m happy enough, and I got my 4 set bonus via Catalyst and a bit of rolling luck. Oh, and I’m back to playing Fury. Guess it goes hand in hand with this low-stress season where I couldn’t really be motivated to learn a new class and/or even gear it beforehand in our break between the seasons.
Ugh, May has been wild and I’ve neither had the time nor any real incentive to play WoW. I think I finished the 10.1 story line so far but didn’t even begin to grind out gear etc.
We only start raiding on the 4th of June (if we even get the people) – it’s been a weird transition from “ok, patch soon, everybody relax” to… no one logging in, no signups going up, or I just missed them because I wasn’t on a lot. Haven’t done a single M+ either, we’ll see how it will work out in that raid week, but I’ll be on vacation soon after.
I did play quite a bit of EVE though, but as usual I find it hard to write about that. I did have fun though.